Teleprompter Operator Bets On President's Next Words After Reading Them First

WASHINGTON—A former White House teleprompter operator made $107,539 by betting on words and phrases President Donald Trump would say in speeches that the employee had access to before they were delivered, federal regulators said.

Gabriel Perez traded presidential “mention market” contracts on Kalshi between December 2025 and February 2026. The contracts pay according to whether a public figure uses a specified word. His government job provided the missing analytical tool: the completed speech.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that Perez misappropriated material, nonpublic information in breach of his duty to the government. He must surrender the profits, pay a $65,000 civil penalty and stay out of the market for three years. Regulators discounted the fine because of what they called his exemplary cooperation, allowing the cooperation to outperform the strategy by losing less money.

Perez was placed on unpaid leave after the trades became public in July and is no longer in the White House position. Then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the conduct unfortunate and a disgrace. Kalshi assisted the CFTC, which demonstrates that a prediction platform can reliably predict when cooperation is preferable to being named in the next paragraph.

The speeches themselves remained public information the moment Trump delivered them. Their market value simply arrived early, one screen at a time, for the federal employee assigned to keep every word moving in the correct direction.